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Can Social Media Rebuild Detroit?

Feb 4th, 2010 Comments Off

What are the top five largest countries in the world by population? USA? Indonesia? China? India? Facebook?!? According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook has acquired over 200 million users who are updating their online status, posting news, and connecting with friends and brands of interest. You’d think that every industry would be tripping over themselves to harness the opportunities offered by Facebook, Twitter and other social media communities. Yet, acccording to JD Rucker, the auto industry seems slow to cash in.

By maintaining a social media presence car manufacturers could interact with potential buyers before they head down to the auto showroom.  They could use search.twitter.com to find folks who tweeted about going car shopping or someone who tweeted about their car breaking down and offer to solve their problem by offering a new car alternative.

Sears uses this tactic with appliances. Recently my cousin’s dishwasher broke.  A Sears repairman came to fix it.  Later that same day, the dishwasher broke again.  After tweeting about it, she discovered a message from someone at Sears who was embarrassed by the repairman and offered to solve her problem by giving her a new dishwasher for free!  That is a terrific example of how brands are using Twitter to maintain customer satisfaction. Imagine the possibilities for auto industry!

Implementation strategies for social media use in both car sales and manufacturing can be found in JD Rucker’s post in FastCompany.com’s blog: Why Going Social Can Make or Break the Automotive Industry. In it he explores the potential for dealer and manufacturer impact on client relations using social media.

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Altimeter Engagement Report

Nov 23rd, 2009 Comments Off

Charlene Li from the Altimeter group has published a view into the benefits and correlations of social media and brand value, along with business margins.

“There exist thousands of social media channels, each with a slightly different value proposition. It is therefore a daunting task to figure how to objectively evaluate various marketing efforts across all social mediums. The Wetpaint/Altimeter Group ENGAGEMENTdb Report introduces a single criterion: engagement.”

Download here.

What is Social Media Optimization?

Oct 5th, 2009 Comments Off

From ESB Journal

Social media optimization or SMO is yet another method for search engine optimization of your site.

As the name implies, you optimize your site by advertising it through the social media sites, online communities and community websites such as blog sites, message boards, podcasts, wikis and blogs.

The methods for social media optimization involve the use of RSS feeds, social bookmarking, video and photo sharing, social news buttons and blogging etc. The basic idea is to drive traffic to your site without spending money on search engine advertising.

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The Web Analytics Headache

Sep 24th, 2009 Comments Off

From eMarketer:

Understanding and integrating data

To prove the success of their campaigns, marketers need analytics. But many report frustration with understanding and using the Web analytics tools necessary to prove their success to management, according to “The Web Analytics War Reader Survey” by Unica.

The biggest challenge for marketers was integrating Web analytics with other marketing solutions, cited by 46% of respondents. Verifying the accuracy of data was a problem for 41% of marketers, while 32% reported trouble with analytics that were not comprehensive and 29% complained of budgets that were too small.

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20% of Tweets About Brands

Sep 17th, 2009 Comments Off

From Social Media Today:

20% of tweets about brands is the results of a Penn State study in the States.

Researchers led by Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology, and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury looked at half a million tweets. 20% of them were apparently people ‘asking and providing’ product information. Assuming three million tweets a day, that would translate into 600k posts daily of direct relevance to brands.

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HOW TO: Kick Start A Community – An Ongoing List

Aug 18th, 2009 Comments Off

community_picJeremiah Owyang’s suggestions for starting and building community online. Read more at Web Strategy.

  1. Create compelling content on a recurring basis. Brands sometimes create videos, podcasts, or stories on a daily or weekly basis that encourages members to come back.
  2. Reward users who fill out their profile. Folks like to see other friendly faces, so giving them access to premium features or recognition of those who have the most complete profiles should recognized.
  3. Invite community influencers and advocates to the community first –giving them first right of testing the system and then inviting others.
  4. Encourage interaction through conversations. Ask questions, talk about controversial topics, or host a contest that encourages participation.
  5. Reward top contributors: Those that participate the most, or perhaps, are the most helpful should be recognized on a leader board, and thanked in public.  Unexpectedly, send them something nice as a thank you, or reward them with premium services –never money.
  6. Centralize your community around your real world events.  People want to find each other before events, talk about the event during the duration, and then afterwards are key.  Use the community in your physical events.
  7. Virtual Events integrate community:  Don’t just use on your real world events, but integrated with your virtual ones, I‘ve written at length about that here.
  8. Integrate with your website –and other customer touchpoints. Remember, corporate sites of the future are aggregations of community discussion, be sure to integrate community in your corporate site.  Make sure your call center, email marketing, and external newsletters all integrate community.  (don’t forget even the email signatures)
  9. Encourage employees to get active.  A party isn’t much fun if there’s no one there, so encourage the hosts (often employees) to kickstart discussions by talking, debating, and arguing about the news, updates, or even relevant YouTube videos will trigger discussion.  Of course, you have a community manager on staff, right?

The Five Biggest Mistakes in Measuring Social Media

Aug 18th, 2009 Comments Off

In his ClickZ post, Gary Stein examines five ways people go wrong when measuring social media.

Big Mistake No. 1: Assuming Your Fans/Followers Will See a Post

Big Mistake No. 2: Failing to Account for Overlap Across Networks

Big Mistake No. 3: Failing to Count Clicks

Big Mistake No. 4: Disregarding Search

Big Mistake No. 5: Focusing on Followers

Stein: “The bottom line with social media measurement: we’re in some really early stages and there are plenty of bright lights to distract us. The biggest mistake of all, of course, is not to measure. With the effort you’re putting into social media, it’s like that famous bumper sticker: “If you’re not concerned, you’re not paying attention.”

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Five Strategies for Customer Service Social Media Excellence

Aug 16th, 2009 Comments Off

As consumers are rapidly adopting social media to voice their disdain about companies, Forrester has surveyed companies on how best to harness the power of the “cloud” to transform those customer experiences. They examined trends for benefits, costs and risks.

In an upcoming teleconference on the topic, Forrest will explain that savvy executives found that smart companies use five emerging best practices:

  • Begin by taking ownership of the social media initiative.
  • Determine your customer social media goal.
  • Keep a laser focus on the customer experience.
  • Understand the fast-changing social technology landscape.
  • Build a strong business case for change.

By following these best practices, companies can use social media to enrich customer experiences, reduce customer service costs, and transform their businesses.

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Public Relations Measurement 2010: Five Things to Forget & Five Things to Learn

Jul 29th, 2009 Comments Off

social-media-model-pptxFrom a terrific post on public relations campaign measurement by Don Bartholomew, Principal of Acumentics Research,  a social media and public relations research and measurement consultancy.

“Public relations measurement is at a crossroads.  Old techniques are no longer sufficient.

Old metrics are no longer applicable.  Old thinking must be replaced by new.

The need for accountability,and to prove the value of PR and social media programs,

has never been greater.

As we look to the next year, here are five things to forget and five things to learn about

public relations measurement in 2010.”

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HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics

Jul 28th, 2009 Comments Off

pack_iconos_sociales_freakgroupFrom Ben Parr at Mashable:

“Social media is a relatively new phenomenon, but Delicious (Delicious), Digg (Digg), StumbleUpon (StumbleUpon) and other social media websites have become an increasingly important source of website traffic. This also creates a massive demand for data related to social media. Where are users coming from? What topics excite them? These are questions that, when answered, can be the difference between a successful website and a failed social media campaign. But social media analytics is young, and not many people know where to start.

Read Ben’s guide which is designed “to help you get started with some of the best tools and habits so that you can effectively gather and analyze social media analytics.”

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